Industrial Scale
Manufacturers, wholesalers and service companies, whether B2B or B2B2C, tend to have high volumes of orders, many product lines and SKUs and high monthly invoice volumes. The same thinking that brings cost and process efficiency to manufacturing can be applied to Accounts Receivable.
On the buy-side, the public sector, major developers and even the manufacturers, as mentioned earlier, can have sophisticated and complicated purchase requirements. Most such businesses have applied scale thinking to procurement, with Accounts Payable systems that automate, track and control spending and stock.
Often, the same companies that have successfully optimised Accounts Payable with automation have not done so for Accounts Receivable. AR, therefore, is often the last department to benefit from systems that automate manual tasks and bring much-needed efficiency, accuracy and control to corporate AR and credit departments.
Invoice Factories in the Cloud
Centralising activity across a group of business units, standardising processes and the software used and harmonising the underlying data set stored in the ERP system can be done for AR with automation.
Some businesses create shared service centres, while others create geographically dispersed but unified teams. No matter where they are located, by using a suitably powerful system. this effectively creates an invoice factory and a production line that requires fewer people in total to oversee. AR teams go from firefighting to quality checking and problem-solving.
Credit teams go from overworked to overperforming. Scale thinking, applied to large businesses, inevitably makes a positive difference to costs, staff morale and management information – or at least the ease with which it can be obtained and analysed.
The Machinery
Having come from smaller teams or business units, with SME thinking, many finance teams make the mistake of chasing the wild geese of AR automation: packages that are suited to SMEs but do not have the capacity to manage volume.
Others go to the opposite extreme and seek solutions in add-on Receivables modules provided by their ERP vendors. These can be inflexible, complicated and functionally lacking.
There is a sweet spot in the middle, where we believe Corrivo is located—designed purposefully for AR and credit teams, not just as an afterthought. Automation platforms offer choice to clients, and their customers provide the plant and machinery for those invoice factories.
If your invoice output monthly is over 10,000, you need specialist software, not generalist SME software or ERP add-ons that can neither offer choice and scope nor promise to save time and tighten processes and costs in general.
To find out more about the machinery of Corrivo, which does the heavy lifting for large businesses, often with 3000 customer accounts more and 20,000 invoices per month across all business units, visit Datainterconnect.com/centralise.
